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Young Irish Based Artists at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition of work by nine young Irish based artists, who are gaining increasing recognition both in Ireland and abroad, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 February 2002. How things turn out forms part of the projects strand of exhibitions, which the Museum has used over the last few years to bring the work of cutting-edge international artists to Irish gallery-goers. On this occasion, however, the focus turns to artists in Ireland who are contributing to an extended definition of contemporary art practice.

Curated by curator and critic Annie Fletcher, How things turn out takes a fresh look at current art production in Ireland, north and south, through the work of Heather Allen, Gerard Byrne, Ann Marie Curran, Seamus Harahan, Garrett Phelan, Eoghan McTigue, Isabel Nolan and Walker & Walker. Much of the work has been created specifically for the show and is being shown for the first time. Comprising painting, sculpture, photography, film, video installation and performance, it takes a refective view of life, suggesting that rather than attempting to influence the future it may be wiser to seek meaning in events as they unfold. To this end each artist seems to be engaged in diverse ways with a process of reinterpretation.

Mountain, 2002, and Northern Star, 2002, from artistic partners Walker & Walker, explore the history of German Romantic painting - painstakingly extracting the physical elements from Caspar David Friedrich’s best known painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, c 1818, and wittily remaking them in pristine sculptural form. Heather Allen gives a performance/reading on the opening night combing texts from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and her own writing on the instability of relationships, which she sees as inextricable from recent traumas in her home town of Portadown. She is also creating an elaborate installation, simulating the tired aftermath of an event when everyone has gone home and only the props remain. Many of the artists, including Garrett Phelan, Seamus Harahan, Ann Marie Curran, Gerard Byrne and Isabel Nolan, mine various cultural reservoirs such as history, art, literature and memory, to form rich and rewarding new work. Commenting on the exhibition curator Annie Fletcher said: “What we set out to do in this exhibition was to create an interesting framework in which the real diversity and strength of these young artists’ work could be shown. A whole range of interests and subjects are interrogated here from Eoghan McTigue’s tricolour photographs, which make us reconsider the symbolism of the national colours, to Seamus Harahan’s powerful meditations on everyday life on the street and how we occupy public space.”

How things turn out continues until 26 May.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, with essays by its curator, Annie Fletcher, and by the international curator and critic Maria Hlavajova. (Price €10.00)